blog added 15/12/2006
One of the major issues 360 degree panoramic photography is how to display your panorama on the web. Simple pictures don't convey the scale or interactivity of immersive 360 degree views, so additional software is required to view them in 3D. The most common tools to do this have been Apple's QuickTime, Java, and Adobe Shockwave. Most bought computers from say Dell, SONY or HP have the first two installed already, Adobe Shockwave is not commonly found pre-installed. All three, if they need to be installed, require users to have full administrator rights on the computer to allow installation, this is fine for home users but not business users. So as a result often visitors have problems viewing the 360 degree 3D panoramas. The quoted installation base of these three add on are commonly 60%, 88% and 50% respectively, however, often this doesn't take into account issues with out of date version of these tools. Another problem was each of these tools required the visitor to stop viewing your website, download sometimes large packages, run the installer, sometimes restart computer and even close the browser down. Hoping your visitors would return, is a faint hope to say the least.